‘Writing about my parents and the death of my mum dredged up some feelings that have fed into this album’

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sunshine
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‘Writing about my parents and the death of my mum dredged up some feelings that have fed into this album’

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September 17 2022 05:00 AM
Suede frontman Brett Anderson: ‘Writing about my parents and the death of my mum dredged up some feelings that have fed into this album’
The Suede frontman talks about the band’s ‘brutal’ recording process, the secret to their longevity and why Autofiction is his most personal album to date
John Meagher
Brett Anderson is buzzing. The night before we speak, he played a blistering show in Manchester with his Suede bandmates, but under a nom de plume, Crushed Kid. It’s unlikely anyone who turned up at the tiny venue, the Deaf Institute, imagined they would be seeing an up-and-coming band. It was one of those ‘secret’ gigs where everybody knew the performers’ identity.
The previous evening, Crushed Kid had delivered an equally rip-roaring set in the intimate Moth Club in east London — a show which The Guardian described, in a nod to the Jonathan Safran Foer novel, as “extremely loud and incredibly close”.
Seeing the whites of the eyes of most of the crowd brought Anderson back to Suede’s early days three decades ago when, as Britain’s most feverishly hyped band, they were about to be fired into the stratosphere.
“It was noisy,” he says, with a laugh. He’s speaking from his Manchester hotel room roughly 12 hours after coming off stage. “My ears are still ringing. I kind of loved it. We knew what it was going to be like because we’ve done these kind of gigs before — in, like, 1991. The places smell of stale beer and the monitors don’t work and it’s all a bit of a f***-up, but that’s sort of the point of it, and you’ve got to ride through it and not get too precious about it.”
The set was short, potent and focused entirely on Suede’s bracingly direct new album, Autofiction. “I thought long and hard about whether we should play encores and come out with Animal Nitrate. The room would have erupted if we had done, and maybe that’s what everyone wanted and we should have given them that, but I feel like the concept of it was it was a new band and we were playing new songs and we wanted to keep it pure like that,” he says.
When Anderson and the rest of Suede decided to take a whole new direction after their stately, elegant 2018 album, The Blue Hour, and record a back-to-basics record, the plan was to write songs and play them in small venues before recording them. Covid soon knocked that idea on its head.
“We’d had shows booked [under another name] and we weren’t going to announce it in advance or leak it,” he says. “And the plan was to play the songs to one man and his dog. We thought it would teach us how to play the songs because you play very differently in a rehearsal room than you do when you play to people.”
The pandemic meant the album got recorded first, but Anderson always clung to the idea of playing the songs in the most unadorned fashion possible.
Autofiction, as the title hints, is arguably his most personal album to date. The songs were written shortly after he finished work on a pair of memoirs — both acclaimed for their stark honesty — and Anderson says the process of penning his autobiography influenced his songwriting.
“I didn’t go into writing the memoirs thinking it was going to directly inform the songwriting, but these things kind of happen because it dredged up a lot of feelings in me and those feelings come out in different media.”
There are a pair of songs on the new album that are informed by his close relationship with his late mother, with opener She Still Leads Me On especially moving.
The memoirs, Coal Black Mornings (which documents his childhood and life up to the formation of Suede) and Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn (an account of the band’s ebbing fortunes), are essential reads for any Suede fan, but they’re strong enough to sustain the interest of even those largely unacquainted with the music.
“I found writing the memoirs such an incredibly wonderful thing for me, personally. I really recommend it,” Anderson says. “And I know that sounds a bit glib because not everyone has the audience, but it’s an amazing way to get to know yourself a bit better. I don’t have soundbites to deliver to say how I got to know myself better, but I just feel as though I’m more familiar with myself. That sounds like a weird thing to say, but sometimes you go through life and not really know who you are. All of these things are in your head, but it’s not until you have to structure them and order them [that true self-knowledge emerges].
“Writing about my parents and the death of my mum definitely dredged up some thoughts and feelings that have fed into this album.”
Although many of the songs are autobiographical, he says he took liberties. “Autofiction is a genre that’s part memoir, part fiction,” he says. “To a certain extent, you’re manipulating the truth. No art is 100pc truth. Even a memoir in which a writer thinks he’s just delivering the nuts and bolts of his life is still making decisions about what they leave out and what they decide to include. At the other end of the spectrum, The Lord of the Rings is the ultimate fantasy book, with its wizards and goblins, but it still contains human truths.”
When recording the album, Suede turned once more to the producer Ed Buller, who was at the tiller when they made their seminal first pair of albums, Suede and Dog Man Star. “He’s like our dad, really,” Anderson says, with a chuckle. “He’s a lovely nutcase. We spend a lot of time arguing and sulking with him.
“How it works is that we write for a while and then he turns up a few months later and we give him the songs. He’ll sit there and he’ll go: ‘No, that’s rubbish. That’s rubbish. That’s great. That’s rubbish. That’s good.’ It’s this brutal kind of process where he’s hacking down your emotional outpourings, but the beauty of that is when he says something’s good, you can really trust him.”
Buller was there in 1992 when they were working on their era-defining self-titled debut album. For those of us who fell hard for Suede then, it’s sobering to realise that debut single The Drowners was released 30 years ago.
Anderson is a very youthful looking 54-year-old and looks trim enough to be able to wear those tight outfits of the early 1990s, but he grimaces, good-naturedly, when I point out that 30 years prior to 1992 was 1962 and The Beatles were bringing out their first album.
“That’s insane — 1962 is, like, prehistoric,” he says. “The world was in black and white. Time is such an odd thing, isn’t it? As you get older, it just seems to get so much faster. Ten years goes like that [clicks fingers]. We’ve been reformed for 12 years and we’ve been together now longer than we were first time around.
“It’s a very different time now. In the 90s, everything was much more intense for us because we were under so much media scrutiny and so much would happen in a year in those days.”
Suede, when it was released in 1993, was the fastest selling British debut album in a decade. Anderson was presented as the voice of a new generation. How did he keep his feet on the ground? He pauses, lost in thought. “I think we really wanted it,” he says eventually. “In those days, if you got these huge rewards, you understood that there was a price to pay for them.
“The press in those days was vicious and it was almost like this gladiatorial contest. You were thrown into the arena with a f**king sword and a shield and you had to fight to the death. And the person who came out on top was holding the other person’s severed head. You got scars from that and you accepted that. And I still do accept that. I don’t think anyone gets through life unscathed.”

‘Autofiction’ is out now
https://www.independent.ie/entertainmen ... RYAHp-nlNA
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